Chapter 1349: Fruits of paranoia(1)
With the Ma family visit out of the way, and their progress checked and date of departure decided, Yang Qing made his way to Ren Shu’s home.
Ideally, since it was daytime, one would think the Deputy Valley Master would be in one of the valley’s assigned courtyards healing, performing his duties as a Deputy Valley Master, or simply being a dutiful staff member of the Valley, which could easily be considered one of the most overworked staff group in the Order, second only to the administrators and perhaps the roaming inquisitors. But alas, Yang Qing knew better.
For a beacon of fairness, the Order was notoriously biased in how it treated its members. Figures of rank like Ren Shu or the members of the Judicial Review Committee all, without fail, seemed to have nothing but idle time on their hands. Where Yang Qing was overworked to the point that even an overburdened mule would look at him with pity and offer words of consolation, Ren Shu and his cohort spent most of their days drinking on the job and "discussing the veiled intricacies of the Grand Dao."
No Dao discussions were taking place at those tables. He believed the nature of those discussions was far more likely to resemble the kind of ’pertinent informative material’ Mao Mao spent two-thirds of her monthly salary on.
Yang Qing, not one to hold grudges or be envious, silently kept everything he saw and uncovered firmly in his heart.
I will be joining you soon... my fellow compatriots,
he silently vowed as he solemnly placed his hands over his chest. Yang Qing exchanged warm smiles and greetings with the staff busily rushing about as he made his way to Ren Shu’s courtyard.
"Senior Yang Qing, are you lending a hand today?" voiced one of the staff members he came across. It was a young cultivator who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen years of age, and from the orange robes he wore and the spirited glint in his eyes, he was no doubt an orange-grade healer and a new one at that. He had likely not been on the job for more than a year, given that he still had the energy to yell, and his eyes lacked that exhausted luster so famously present in the eyes of most of his seniors.
"Not today. I still have some personal matters to attend to. When I finish with them, I’ll make sure to pass by," Yang Qing politely said.
He recognized the young healer. The boy had been part of the ’audience’ last time he was here, flaunting his healing skills in hopes of earning praise or fifty for them and their undying admiration. Seeing the shiny eyes filled with unconcealed admiration now, Yang Qing knew his actions that day had not been wasted.
"Not wasted at all," Yang Qing told himself as a bundle of pride grew in him. "Even though I almost died." A cold sweat ran through him as he remembered the incident. It would be a lie to say he didn’t have nightmares about that day or feel a slight worry being here.
The Medical Valley was like his second abode or office, given how frequently he visited it. Whenever he felt fatigued or wound up, other than his abode, this was usually the second place he came to. Being here always seemed to ease him.
Everything about it centered him, whether it was the luscious, endless fields of herbs and their refreshing fragrance that constantly enveloped the valley, the sprawling hills and riverways that created the aesthetic illusion of a meadow, the sight of its workers up and about being overworked even more than he was, Ren Shu whom he constantly leeched from, or simply the fact that the valley, for all the violence the cultivation world had, was one of the few places where preserving life was considered a sacred mandate.
Everything about it appealed to Yang Qing, and if it had not been for their working schedule that was even more hellish than being a judge, and the fact that he knew Ren Shu, as amiable as he was, would have worked him to the bone even well into his domain realm years, joining the Medical Valley would have actually been his preferred choice if their working schedule had even been remotely reasonable.
But now, though he still felt a deep sense of connection to it, the sense of safety this place once held for him had small fissures running through it, thanks to that incident from last time when, in the process of trying to harmlessly show off, he inadvertently triggered an insidious trap hidden within the body of one of the patients he had been treating. He could have died in the process had his physique not reacted on its own in a desperate bid to protect him.
He survived, but he was unable to use his physique for an entire month, which was frightening enough on its own and only outshone by the fear that deathly experience left behind, and the news that the object behind it had not been in just that one patient.
Even months after the incident, whenever his random bouts of paranoia kicked in, Yang Qing always found himself replaying the Valley Master’s voice in his mind, where she informed him that the quasi-saint grade bomb that had almost taken his life had other cousins and siblings scattered throughout the valley, concealed within patients, buildings, and other features.
The questions that usually followed that replay were always the same. First, how had they managed to sneak those many bombs right under the Order’s nose? Second, did they really manage to find them all? And third, what would have happened if he had not decided to show off and accidentally trigger one of them?
The Medical Valley could be considered one of the most important strategic places within the Order. Given the work it did and the purpose the Order served, it was easy to understand why the place held such value. The work carried out there was one of the main reasons the Order had managed to survive to this day, despite the countless hostilities and dangers it constantly faced.
Because of its role in maintaining and sustaining the lifeline of the Order, it would not be an exaggeration to call the Medical Valley one of its hearts. And for that very reason, it was also among the most heavily secured places around. Not to mention, the Order used the Valley to build its image by allowing outside cultivators to receive treatment there.
How had those quasi-saint grade bombs been sneaked in? Was the security in the Valley lax? Given the importance the Medical Valley held, Yang Qing was inclined to believe that was unlikely. Then how?
Yang Qing’s answer to said question was that the enemy had grown more sophisticated. It wasn’t that their defenses were lax, but rather that the enemy had spent considerable resources and effort to penetrate them. After all, according to the Valley Master’s analysis of that bomb, she had surmised that it required the hands of three highly skilled professionals to create it: a purple grade herbologist, a top-tier gold grade formation master, and a top-tier gold grade artificer.
Any one of them alone was as rare as phoenix feathers or qilin hairs, and any cultivator with that level of expertise was enough to create a wave on the continent by their lonesome purely by virtue of their skill, let alone three of them working together.